For Cozi Zuehlsdorff, landing the lead role in Disney Channel’s new musical version of “Freaky Friday,” took one audition, four callbacks and a screen test. But when you’re essentially playing two characters, both of them inhabiting your one body, it’s understandable there would be a lot more hoops to jump through.

“They know it is going to be such a big deal that they have to be sure,” says Zuehlsdorff, 20, an Orange County native best known for her starring roles in “Dolphin Tale” and its sequel “Dolphin Tale 2.” “Literally probably 50 people have to sign off on you, so it’s a lot of pressure.”

But what a great role it is to play the part of Ellie, the teenage daughter who swaps bodies with her mother so they can see what it’s like to be each other for a day. The movie premieres at 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 10, on Disney Channel. “The very nature of the project, that I get to play two characters that are in the same body, it was such a fun challenge,” says Zuehlsdorff, who started her acting career in community theater in Aliso Viejo. “I would say I was more excited about it than other auditions. It proved to be very different than anything I had shot.”

“Freaky Friday,” of course, has a long cinematic history, reaching back to the original 1976 version that starred Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris as the daughter and mom, a 1995 TV movie with Gaby Hoffman and Shelley Long, and a 2003 movie with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis.

This new Disney Channel Original Movie features Zuehlsdorff with Heidi Blickenstaff as her mother. Its freshness comes from the fact that this time the movie is done as a musical, something Zuehlsdorff has some experience with (she’s a singer-songwriter in addition to acting) and Broadway actress Blickenstaff, who played the same role in a 2016 stage adaptation, has even more.

“Heidi is immensely talented,” Zuehlsdorff says. “She comes from the Broadway world where she starred as Ursula in ‘The Little Mermaid.’”

This is Blickenstaff’s first movie, though, so the two were able to share their knowledge on different aspects of their craft, Zuehlsdorff says.

“We were able to learn and get insight from each other,” she says. “We were both very open to kind of hearing about each other’s experiences, and just learning from each other.”

Zuehlsdorff had written and performed the song “Brave Souls” for “Dolphin Tale 2,” and landed an even bigger assignment on “Freaky Friday,” co-writing “What It’s Like To Be,” the opening number in the film.

“As a singer-songwriter I get to kind of do whatever I want, and go where the muse takes me,” she says. “Writing this for Disney, they approached me because I had pitched them a lot of my own music, and said, ‘Would you like to try writing the opening song?’

That song needed to hit certain aspects of the story, so the musical team working on the movie gave her notes on what to include, Zuehlsdorff says.

“The reason the song exists is because they felt the audience only gets 10 or 15 minutes of me establishing what Ellie is like as a teen before we swap bodies,” she says. “They wanted to sure people knew who she is. They wanted a teen rebellion song but they also wanted it to have a positive message.

“There were twists and turns like that where it almost felt like writing an essay with a prompt – it was a lot more pressure.”

She says she’s seen the film a couple of times now, partly because the first time she was focusing too closely on the work she’d done and didn’t really appreciate the movie as a movie.

“That experience of being able to see it objectively and not looking at it through a microscope really came the second time I screened the movie,” Zuehlsdorff says. “It was really emotional and special. The fact that it starts with a song I wrote is enough to make me cry.

“It brings a lot of joy to me because I truly love everyone I worked with,” she says. “I’m proud of it. Even if the rest of the world hated it, which I’m hoping they won’t, I’m really proud.”

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.